All posts tagged women

On 16 Nov, 2015, I Had Sent the Following Letter to The Offices Addressed Below, Requesting Protection and Urgent Action on Benami (Fake) Bank Accounts under the Name “Palm Place Syndicate,” And on the Criminal Nexus Involved, Who Are a Serious Threat to Me and My Mother’s Safety

1. I have enclosed in the letter for Mr. Gaurav Sharma, DC Police, SE, Kolkata, a cheque (no.689087 of SBI) from my mother, Indira Banerji of the amount Rs.6000/- made out A/C Payee to “Palm Place Syndicate.”This is the benami (fake) bank account (S/B 04770100017689 in Indian Overseas Bank, Ballygunge Park Rd., Kolkata), I have already complained about to all your offices. We’ve been forced to put Rs.1,04,000/- into this account since June 2015, due to harassment, threats, assault and destruction of our property. I am writing, because we cannot take this anymore and we urgently need the police, RBI and ED to take action on these accounts and on the individuals involved in this extortion nexus to ensure our safety. The banks have refused to act as it involves internal corruption. Karaya police station has not acted despite our FIRs on extortion, assault, and property damage (FIR 217, FIR 292, FIR 539). [See Appendix 21]

2. At the back of the check my mother has written this note to explain why she is sending it:
“I, Indira Banerji, do not want to put this money in the account S/B 04770100017689 which is under the name ‘Palm Place Syndicate.’ But I have been forced under threat, violence and other pressure to deposit this and other cheques by the following:
1) Biman Dhar (Address, Phone)
2) Prem Prakash Sahoo (Address, Phone)
3) Somnath Bhattacharyya (HR, Premiere World Tech Ltd., Address, Phone)
4) Michael J. Pook(Employee of Premier World Tech, Occupant of Indira Banerji’s flat no.7 for 28 years, Phone)
5) A.K. Ghosh (Victor Moses Co., Address; phone)I am asking Mr. Gaurav Sharma (D.C. Police, SE) to give the check to one of the five above , if he thinks this is right.”

3. In October 2014, I discovered the ‘Palm Place Syndicate’ account in the Standard Chartered Bank (a/c 33610022158) into which these men had been making my mother put money for “maintenance” of her ownership flats for many years, is a benami (fake) account. The account has no registration, PAN, identity proof, or address proof, and had been in the bank’s legal cell since 2010. We found this out when Mr. Biman Dhar, Mr. Nikhilesh Chandra Roy [phone], Mr. Prem Prakash Sahoo and Mr. Pinakpani Chakravarti [phone], conspired to make my mother, Indira Banerji a signatory to that account in Sept 2014, by saying they now wanted a “lady” to take care of the “building society account.” I discovered that the account had already been served the final legal closure notice two months prior to that. Prior to this, they had blocked my mother from any access to this bank account even though with two flats she is a majority flat owner in the building. [See Appendix 1, 3, 7, 8]

4. They also pulled out all the money in the account through K.R. Sriram, the auditor who (I then realized) had been making fake audit reports on Palm Place Syndicate’s benami bank account till 2013. Mr. Sriram has refused to communicate with us. [See Appendix 4, 10, 11, 12]

5. Mr. Biman Dhar and the other flat owners have refused to give us any proof of registration and byelaws for ‘Palm Place Syndicate’ as a registered building society. They make random demands for large sums of money and make us deposit the money directly in the account without giving any receipt. They make random cash withdrawals, write checks to ‘self’, give fake name of companies for repair and paints, and refuse to provide any bills, accounts or receipts for money taken or used. Their demands keep escalating and now they want in lakhs. They have conspired to harass us by sabotaging our drinking water, destroying our property, and physical violence. They are doing this because there are no official documents, and they are using the benami accounts to extort money but likely also for other illegal activities. We don’t know how many benami accounts in how many banks they have under this name of ‘Palm Place Syndicate,’ or what activities they are used for. One owner, Mrs. Ruchi Jain [phone] told us she had also opened an account with Mr. Dhar in (more…)

Last week millions of Hindu women proudly celebrated a festival whose fundamental tenet is misogynistic. This is the festival of Karva Chauth. Women deprive themselves of food and water all day, and after sunset break their fast after they’ve viewed the moon through a kitchen sieve. They’ve been told that if they do this, the gods will ensure long lives for their husbands. In a country where every year, more than a 100,000 married women are murdered for dowry — burnt, hung, stabbed, poisoned, drowned, or driven to suicide — by their husbands and in-laws, and not a day goes by without media reports of such deaths, this womanly fixation on ensuring a long life for the husband seems sort of bizarre. But there is a cultural explanation for Indian women’s fixation on their husbands’ long lives….

But the really bad news is that that isn’t a real estimate of how many can actually read and write in India. When there was a lot of angst expressed over how India houses almost half the world’s illiterates, the government got down to work on it — of course Indian style.

They created a new official definition for ‘literacy.’ By this unique Indian method, anyone who can read and write their name is officially counted as literate!! So Sita who can write S I T A, but doesn’t know the alphabets, can’t read and write anything else, considers herself literate.

Not only that, these women even when they work and earn, have no idea of how much they are actually earning or should be earning. They have no concept of savings, or calculation of change when they go shopping and take whatever change is handed over to them. So among the 60% women literates, 84% (see below) have little or no idea of how to handle daily cash transactions!

There was a Sita who had worked as a part-time domestic help for for me for a year. She was proud to call herself “literate” and insisted on signing the pay register instead of putting her thumb print as is customary for “illiterates” in India. They are called the “angootha chchaps” (thumb printers) — an offensive term. Naturally no one wants to own it. I had about 12 ‘signatures’ from Sita, all wildly varying in shapes and proportions. She turned down repeated requests from me to allow me to teach her. She said what she ‘knew’ sufficed her. Of course I or someone was always there to fill her forms, help her with her banking etc. But she was happy and proud to say she could write. As I suppose is India!

I think what is bothersome is how most female politicians in India take this kind of sexual molestation by men in public venues into their stride. It comes with the job attitude! If the women in the position of power and politics don’t kick up a huge storm over this, is it any surprise they are not out there speaking for the common women’s rights? A slap? That’s enough? Is it any surprise that as people’s representatives these women often function like they know that this is a country for men, by men, and of men, and they are here only to serve men?

Politics and government are often touted as venues for the empowerment of women in India. But the fact is that female politicians are subject to the same kind of harassment and sexual molestations in public spaces, like women in India are on a daily basis, even as they campaign for the upcoming elections in April 2014.

Politician Nagma, despite a strong ring of bodyguards, has been groped on numerous occasions, sometimes by male politicians and sometimes by men in public gatherings. Last week Nagma responded by publicly slapping one man who grabbed at her. Some female politicians don’t get out of their cars because they fear being molested. Others clear wide spaces and speak only from a raised platform.

‘Women’s empowerment’ is probably one of the most overused phrases in global campaigns today. But who exactly is an empowered woman? I was asked this question in a recent interview and this is what I said:

An empowered woman for me is a woman who has realized that freedom and power is not something that another person or society can give you. Whatever your circumstance, as humans we all are born free, and our power is within. The question is, have you allowed others to rob you of your freedom and choices? Are you using your power to assert yourself, your freedom and choices, or are you giving away your power to the system that’s trying to repress you through rules, customs, and fear?

An empowered woman is one who has complete ownership of self, which is the absolute and fundamental essence of being a free citizen in a democracy. It is only slaves and prisoners whose lives are controlled by others through fear and power. Women and girls controlled by society, family, traditions, religions, through dictums, and fear and power, are like slaves and prisoners.

A woman who is a doctor or engineer, whose parents are blackmailed for dowry, who continues to tolerate violence and death threats from her husband and in-laws, but does not walk out to reclaim her sanity and safety, because she fears social stigma for herself or her family, is not empowered. In fact, I say, that a village woman is more empowered than her, who may have little education, but who defies khap and community diktats, and chooses to leave her community and seek a new life with a lover of her own choosing. It is the village woman who is more empowered than the urban, educated, working woman, because she has recognized and claimed her absolute freedom as a human being.